COVID revealed the raw underbelly of the U.S. food manufacturing industry. While politicians are blaming consolidation and greed for the disrupted supply chain and skyrocketing food inflation, the industry’s problems are far more complex than the sound bites produced in Washington. In sum, food manufacturing is too labor intensive and unproductive relative to overall manufacturing in the U.S. Notably, U.S. food manufacturing was considered the envy of the world in the 1970’s. A major U.S. export at the time was used food processing equipment as manufacturers fought to stay ahead of one another in productivity. Spin forward to today and part of the reason for a labor shortage is not just the pandemic but a failure to automate as...
What You Need to Know Today: Markets got a surprise with a corn yield of 181.2 bushels/acre in the October WASDE, above the average estimate of 177.6 bushels/acre and up from USDA’s September estimate of 178.5 bushels/acre. Although stronger demand is expected to absorb some of the addit...
Key Takeaways: On Friday afternoon, President Trump announced that Russia will “immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel” to the United States. The deal, typical of this administration, is light on details but promises an additional 500,000 tons in November and 1 m...
The USDA has lowered its 2026 red meat production forecasts slightly while forecasting a slight increase in broiler production. Beef is now projected at 24.802 billion pounds, 75 million pounds less than in September. Cow slaughter is expected to be up; however, this will be offset by lower ste...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.